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As an African American Studies major at Wesleyan Lawrence Riddell always sought ways to communicate the complex history of race and racism in America

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Thesis statement for Racism in America? | Yahoo Answers

In addition to shaping the methods used to address the drug problem, the rhetoric of war also shaped the impact of those methods, for a war requires not only military strategies, but an enemy as well. For the constituency the Reagan Administration was trying to reach, it was easy to construct African Americans, Hispanics, and other people of color as the enemy in the War on Drugs. These are the groups that the majority of white Americans have always viewed as the sources of vice and crime. Reagan's anti- drug rhetoric was skillfully designed to tap into deeply held cultural attitudes about people of color and their links to drug use and other illicit behavior. According to mass communications scholar William Elwood, Reagan's rhetorical declaration of a war on drugs had a deliberate political effect. In Elwood's view, 'Such rhetoric allows presidents to appear as strong leaders who are tough on crime and concerned about domestic issues and is strategically ambiguous to portray urban minorities as responsible for problems related to the drug war and for resolving such problems.' Thus, the origins of the drug war can be traced to shifting public attitudes toward drugs in the early 1980s. President Reagan sought to exploit this change in attitude through a public relations campaign that promised to wage 'war on drugs.' As the metaphor of war might suggest, the War on Drugs required both weapons and enemies. A punitive law enforcement policy of prohibition and interdiction provided the weapons and, while the professed enemies of the War on Drugs were drug cartels in drug source countries, those most affected were people of color in inner city neighborhoods, chiefly African Americans and Hispanics.

22/05/2008 · Thesis statement for Racism in America

Underlying my obsession with this paradox was a premise which I nowbelieve to be mistaken -- that being an authentic black person involvesin some elemental way seeing oneself as an object of mistreatment by whitepeople, while participating in a collective consciousness of that mistreatmentwith other black people. As long as I believed that my personal identityas a black American was necessarily connected to our country's historyof racial violation, and derived much of its content from my sharing withother blacks in a recollection of and struggle against this violation,I was destined to be in a bind. For, as my evolving understanding of ourhistory began to clash with the black consensus, and my definition of thestruggle took on a different, more conservative form from that popularamong other black intellectuals, I found myself cut off from the group,my racial bona fides in question. I was therefore forced to choose betweenmy intellectual integrity and my access to that collective consciousnessof racial violation and shared experience of struggle which I saw as essentialto my black identity. Like Woody, lacking social confirmation of my subjectivesense of self, I was left uncertain about who I really was.

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To fully understand the significance of the drug trade and the oppression of African people and other people of color, one must recognize the central role drug trafficking has played in the European conquest of other cultures and the maintenance of white supremacy worldwide. Addictive and deleterious substances have historically been used to undermine non-European societies and further white interests. In this connection, drugs can be used to weaken a country or culture internally and limit its ability to resist white economic or cultural intrusion. This classic use of drugs for political purposes is what happened to China during the Opium Wars. The supply of alcohol to Native Americans in North America is also a primary example of the use of drugs for oppression.

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If the architects of the drug war knew their plans would have devastating impact on the African American community, then they apparently did not care. What could provide the motive for such an assault on African Americans? According to Tonry, the motive was two-fold. First, Tonry claims that to the extent the Reagan and Bush administrations attempted to craft an actual drug policy, they intended to use the criminalization of behaviors disproportionately found in the African American and Hispanic community to shape and encourage anti-drug values and beliefs in the white community. Thus, the drug war was 'an exercise in moral education' that inflicted great damage on young African Americans and Hispanics 'primarily for the benefit of the great mass of, mostly white, non-disadvantaged Americans.' But Tonry suggests there is another, more sinister, reason for the sacrifice of the young African American victims of the drug war. According to Tonry, the drug war was 'launched to achieve political, not policy objectives.' Reagan's advisors wanted to reap the political benefits of appearing tough on drugs at a time when drug use had fallen into disfavor with the American public. The drug war, then, was a cynical way to 'use . . . disadvantaged [B]lack Americans as a means to the achievement of politician's electoral ends.'

Race and crime in america essay - Login Entrar

'Driving while Black' refers to the police practice of using the traffic laws to routinely stop and detain Black motorists for the investigation of crime in the absence of probable cause or reasonable suspicion for the stop. There is reason to believe that this is a widespread practice performed by police officers throughout the nation. Many prominent African Americans have reported being victimized by these stops. Although they have unfortunately become routine, '[s]uch stops and detentions are by their very nature invasive and intrusive.'

Essay on race relations in america

Jerome Miller analyzed arrest statistics from several American cities to determine the impact of the War on Drugs on policing. He found striking racial disparities in how drug arrests were made. In many jurisdictions, African American men account for over eighty percent of total drug arrests. In Baltimore, for example, African American men were eighty-six percent of those arrested for drug offenses in 1991. The fact that African Americans are incarcerated in such large percentages and are arrested and incarcerated at such disproportionate rates is shocking. It is obscene in the absence of a strong showing that African Americans are responsible for a comparable percentage of crime in the United States.